Viddling Around™

Guba announced on Thursday that it’s partnered with the MPAA to track down copyrighted material. What’s more intriguing is that they’re making the technology available for licensing to other online video sites. Now, how many competitors in the overcrowded video sharing space will want to partner with Guba is a big question, as is whether or not the oh-so-friendly folks at the MPAA will use this as a blunt instrument to force other sites to comply.

The technology itself isn’t that revolutionary - it’s been talked about for years; scanning a piece of digital media to establish a “fingerprint”. What Guba and the MPAA don’t discuss is just how they’re going to crack down on piracy using these fingerprints. Whether or not they’ll just scan files uploaded to Guba, or will actively go out and look for files on YouTube and other sites is the question.